LogFAQs > #929896829

Muscles posted...

I'm only talking about real ones like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, etc.

I can honestly say that through the entire course of my life, I've never met a single person who ever considered Halloween a "real" holiday. At least not in the sense that ANY business closes over it. Schools don't even close for Halloween. As for families spending time together, that's really not a thing. If anything, fewer and fewer people have really given much of a shit over the last couple decades - I could easily see it slowly dying off or becoming even more insignificant over the next century or so.

Thanksgiving's a thing, but for a lot of people it's almost more of an obligation than something to look forward to, and the days of large extended families getting together are kind of a thing of the past. Very few people celebrate the day for its actual intended meaning, and it's not as if people who are dead-set on having a sort of family reunion day can't do so on their own within their own scheduling rather than expecting the rest of the world to facilitate it for them (and doing so on your own time, if it's that important to you, also means that the impact of people taking time off to do it would be dispersed). And the fact that tons of people prefer to go out to a restaurant or similar for Thanksgiving pretty much necessitates a large group of the working base not getting the day off (and the fact that retail is now pushing "Black Friday" back to "Black Thursday Night", plenty of people in retail are going to be expected to work as well).

As for Christmas, that can get really messy. Just from the religious perspective, why should the 100 million or so people in the US who don't consider themselves Christian be denied services to cater to the 200 million or so who do (especially when many of them are non-observant at best)? Especially since it's not like people of other faiths have an expectation that holidays like Hanukkah/Yom Kippur or Ramadan will be treated the same way. And from a purely secular perspective, who the fuck cares about a joke farce of a holiday? It's basically like a reverse birthday party, and plenty of people see it as more of an annoying obligation or burden to endure rather than something to look forward to. The only reason most people care about it as a major "family" day is because they've been programmed to think that way by years and years of advertising, which mostly just wants them to spend a lot of money on gifts to keep the economy primed. Plenty of people don't celebrate Christmas. It's likely more and more won't in the future, at least not in any meaningful sense.

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